Time's Chariot (18 page)

'I won't be able to get there for at least an hour
after he arrived,' Su said. 'That's how long he's
been gone.' The Register would insist on an hour's
interval.

'I know, I know. We'll have to hope he stays out
of trouble,' Marje agreed.

'And he might have done everything he needs to
do in that hour. He might recall as I transfer.'

'In which case, just come back,' Marje said. 'The
point is, can you do it?'

'I can do it,' Su agreed, 'but he won't be happy.
He was enjoying this.'

'Do the job, Su,' Marje said, 'and let me worry
about your partner's feelings.'

'Whatever you say,' Su said without expression.
She stood to go. 'I'll be off, Commissioner.'

If Su could play formal, so could Marje: she kept
her professional, patrician face on as Su left the
office. Then she winced.

Scratch one friendship?
she thought.
God, being a
patrician had better be worth it
.

The waves rippled a hundred feet below Rico.
The cliffs were a dark outline ahead of him and
the white shape of the hotel was striking in the
moonlight.

He was grinning with the sheer joy of it. This was
more like it. Now to see if his guess was right.

BioCarr played such an important part in twenty-first
century history that as many of its records as
possible were archived. A study of the database had
turned up a cryptic mention of a senior BioCarr
executive and his family having their reservation at
the company hotel abruptly cancelled, on their
boss's own orders, for some mystery VIP guests who
were there for an indefinite stay. The exec had fired
off an angry memo to complain. Matthew
Carradine had answered personally that this was
need-to-know, the guests came first and if this man
wanted to keep his pension and position, there was
a good way to go about it.

It was a good clue: Rico just hoped it was the one
he needed. He had the date of the exec's intended
holiday. He had the co-ordinates of the hotel, and
while he didn't have records of the building that
had stood at that point, he did have records of the
local geography. So, he had chosen a new set of coordinates,
half a mile to the west of the original,
and thus he appeared clad in a fieldsuit set to full
camouflage and wearing an agrav that held him
safely in mid-air above the sea.

The lenses he wore gave him night vision, the
sensors in his suit took a 3D reading of the area,
and the data from both of them were fed into his
fieldsuit's computer and thence directly into
his brain. In two seconds, Rico was in complete
command of the situation.

The cliffs were ahead. He set the agrav to a mild
descent and forward thrust, and began to move
towards the hotel on the cliff top. Primitive flying
machines were cruising the area slowly but even in
the unlikely event of one of them shining a spotlight
directly at him, they probably wouldn't see
him, black against the night sky. Invisible electromagnetic
pulses were sweeping periodically over
him and his surroundings, but the suit's camo took
care of them and made sure no incriminating
echoes bounced back to their source.

The hotel was swarming with bygoners. Armed
bygoners: the sensors were picking up clear
indications of weapons. But then, he had guessed
that from the presence of the helicopters and the
other security precautions.

'
Attempting contact
.'

What the . . . ? There had been no mistaking that
mental brush against his awareness, though it was
something he hadn't expected to encounter in the
field. His computer was networking.

'
We are receiving a signal on the wavelength assigned
to correspondents
,' the suit symbed at him. '
Should this
unit respond?
'

'Negative! On no account,' Rico said immediately,
though his heart sang:
right guess!
Asaldra was
here all right. Then: 'There's a correspondent
down there?'

'
Incorrect inference. The signal comes from a symb
junction in the vicinity that is routinely attempting to
make contact
.'

'Scan area for this unit,' Rico ordered.

'
Unit is located in the building immediately ahead
.'

One corner of Rico's vision expanded, showing
an infra-red view of one of the larger rooms in the
hotel on the ground floor. There was a whole
jumble of equipment there and the symb junction
was outlined while a crowd of people were gathered
about it. It was an innocent item of Home Time
equipment, doing what it had no doubt been doing
since it got here, which was vainly reaching out to
connect with the rest of the world-wide symb network
that wouldn't exist for centuries.

'Identify the rest of that,' Rico said, feeling
suddenly cold.

'
Unable to determine function of items indicated at this
time
.'

'Can you tell where it all comes from?'

'
Provenance of the items indicated is the Home Time.
'

'What is the man doing?' Rico murmured. He
drew up a mental list of Hossein Asaldra's misdemeanours.
Item: abused correspondent-derived
information. Item: possibly (still circumstantial, he
reminded himself, and Orendal was having none of
it) been somehow involved in the murder of the
late Commissioner Daiho. Item: made contact with
a correspondent. Item: engaged in unauthorized
transferences. And now, item: runs guns to the
natives. Dangerous, stupid and very illegal.

'He's not in this alone,' he muttered with a
sudden realization. Any one of the above, an
aberrant individual of the Home Time might get
up to . . . but all of it? There was just too much
happening. And that probably meant there were
more Home Timers down there too. Maybe they
were those people he could see around the equipment.
God, he hoped they were Home Timers: the
alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

Rico scowled and set the agrav to descend.

He touched down gently in the hotel garden,
with the trip wires and security beams clearly outlined
in his enhanced vision, and moved silently
towards the back door. It was wired, too.

'
Get me in
,' he symbed.

'
Please place your hands accordingly
,' symbed the
computer. Outlines of his hands appeared in his
vision – one over the door lock, the other at the
jamb where the alarm sensor was located. Rico did
as he was told and felt power tingle in his finger tips
for a moment.

'
You have ten seconds to enter the building
.' Rico did
so without fuss or delay.

He was in the staff area of the hotel – a narrow
passage, plain white walls – and the lights were on,
which for the first time meant the fieldsuit's camo
would be compromised. Machines wouldn't be
worried that nothing was reflecting back at them;
human eyes would. He would be a black, man-shaped
hole in their vision and he needed a more
visible disguise.

From the first room on his left he heard happy
shouts, just beating the roar of ten thousand voices
and a bygoner apparently on the verge of a heart
attack.

'
Go-al! And what a triumph that was for this young
striker in his first league match, with five minutes to
go
. . .'

A sporting event being reported on; and that
meant bygoners watching it. He peered slowly
round the door. Four cheering men, each with an
open can in one hand and the other hand waving
or pounding a comrade on the back, never moving
their eyes more than a couple of degrees from the
screen mounted on the wall. Much more of interest
to Rico was their dress: white jackets, dark trousers.
Hotel staff.

'
Match that
,' he symbed to the fieldsuit.

'
This unit requires a three hundred and sixty degree
view of the clothing in question
.'

'
I thought you might
.' He tensed his fingers and a
synjammer slid down his sleeve and into his hand.
He stepped into the room, brought the crystal
sphere up and beamed it in one smooth movement.

The four men froze in mid action, then
slowly straightened up and sat still in their chairs.
Rico grabbed the nearest one and pulled him to his
feet.

'
Do you have a good enough view now?
'

'
Affirmative. This unit is complying with previous
instruction
.'

Rico put the bygoner back in his chair and
looked down at himself. The suit's hood retracted
into its collar as his body seemed to ripple for a
moment, and then he was wearing dark trousers
and a white jacket identical to those of the other
men. Nor was it just an optical illusion: anyone who
handled him would have the feel of the bygoner
material transmitted into the nerves of their
fingertips.

The computer showed him a route through the
building, based on his previous scans. He quickly
searched the nearest frozen bygoner for some kind
of identification and came across a primitive smartcard
in the breast pocket. He took it, grabbed hold
of a silver tray and stepped briskly out of the pantry.
He set the synjammer to revive, held it around the
door and discharged it, then walked quickly away as
the conversations started in mid-sentence again.
Why the sports programme had suddenly skipped
thirty seconds, he left to them to work out.

He met his first guards immediately he stepped
into the guest area: two of them, either side of the
door that led to the staff quarters. His sensors had
already told him they were there and he didn't even
spare them a look as he walked past. He was in
uniform, in a secure area where everyone had been
thoroughly vetted already, and the only thing to do
was look confident.

The guards wore no attributable uniform, just
black jumpsuits that could have belonged anywhere.

Rico suspected they were BioCarr's private
army, which was actually a slight relief. Officialdom
in this era hadn't been alerted as to the Home
Time's existence.

Two more guards came down the short passageway
that led to the lounge. There wasn't enough
room for them all, so he courteously stepped aside.

'Ta, mate.'

Even guards could be human, Rico reflected as
he pushed open the door to the lounge.

'You! What do you want?'

Rico put on his best wounded face at the
bygoner gorilla approaching. He brandished
the tray.

'Just clearing up,' he said, careful to match the
accents of the four sports fans. He had spent leave
in the best hotels of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. He knew how good service was done, and
that included clearing up at regular intervals.

'It's all cleared up. This is a secure area.'

'Blimey! What's all that?' Rico said, peering past
the bygoner. It was what he had come to see: an
array of equipment, nothing whose function he
recognized but whose design was unmistakable.
And the jumble of people was still there – bygoner
civilians, whose poking and prodding of the Home
Time tech made Rico's heart jump into his mouth.

'Never mind. Now push off.'

'All right, all right,' Rico said, still in his best hurt
hotel staff tone of voice, and backed out.

'
Identify
,' he symbed.

'
One symb junction. One field generator. Four fluid
regulators. Seven
—'

'
What was the overall purpose of that equipment?
'
Rico symbed impatiently. He was back in the main
hallway and he couldn't afford to linger under the
gaze of the guards there, so as if it was the most
natural thing in the world he headed for the stairs.
'
This unit conjectures that the equipment had a
biotechnological function
.'

'
Can't you be more specific?
' Rico asked as he took
the stairs slowly, one at a time: a humble servant, all
too aware that those guards were still down there.

'
Not with this level of data
.'

He was halfway up. '
Scan the floors above. Give me
layout and personnel deployment
.'
The computer analysed what lay ahead. Most
interesting were the four bedrooms, each with an
armed guard outside it. Surely, Rico conjectured, if
you wanted to guard important people at a hotel
then, OK, you would seal off the area, mount
patrols, station sentries, throw up a security blanket
. . . everything the bygoners had done. But individual
guards on individual rooms? That didn't
connect. You only did that if you wanted to keep
certain parties apart . . .

Rico began to suspect he knew where the Home
Timers were.

Two of the rooms were next door neighbours on
the landing, with their sentries in plain view of each
other. Rico walked past them without a glance.
Beyond them lay a small staircase, up to what had
once been the servants' quarters in the hotel's prehistory.

At the top was a narrow and conveniently
dog-legged corridor, giving access to the other two
guarded rooms.

The inhabitant of one of the top rooms was
asleep, or at least in bed; the other was still awake,
sitting on his or her bed, head in hands. Rico chose
that room. At the top of the stairs he turned left
and walked quickly round the bend in the passage,
synjammer already up and discharging before the
sentry could say a word.

The computer told him of three listening devices
and two hidden cameras in the room the other side
of the door, and added that it was able to feed them
false data. Rico raised the synjammer again and slid
past the frozen sentry. He threw the door open and
a terrified face looked up at him.

'This one?' said Alan, looking thoughtfully at one
of the Home Time modules.

'That's it, sir,' said the scientist who had reported
the event. He had been put out to find that an
incident he had tried to report to Matthew
Carradine had only garnered a visit from
Matthew Carradine's assistant, but he was getting
over it. 'It suddenly started flashing. Well, lights
running over it. Then it went dead again.'

'Did it, now.' Alan looked down at the module,
rubbing his chin. 'Right.' He moved suddenly into
action, turning quickly to the nearest guard and
suddenly sounding far more like someone in
authority. 'You. Fetch the two youngsters down, get
them to dismantle the equipment and stow it for
transport. Give them all the assistance they need
and do whatever they say. Don't worry, you'll get Mr
Carradine's authority.' He already had his phone
out and was jabbing at the buttons.

'Daiho?' Rico exclaimed. 'And when was this?'

'U-Union Day.' The still-shaken biotech journeyman
whom Rico had found in the bedroom was
obviously convinced he had just compounded his
crimes.
Union Day
, Rico thought – two days after
Daiho was meant to have taken the final plunge
from his apartment.